conveyed. Toscani’s photographs are usually cre-
ated inside a studio; most of them are portraits,
shot frontally, against a neutral background.
Toscani was one of the first photographers to
use modern advertising to send ethical messages.
Favored topics were racism and social prejudice,
the fight against AIDS, the injustice of war, and
capital punishment in the United States. The in-
cursion of ethical messages in his Benetton ads
have drawn opposite reactions: some accused Ben-
etton of commercial exploitation, while some be-
lieved he was increasing public awareness of
critical social issues.
Oliviero Toscani was born 28 February 1942 in
Milan. His father, Fedele Toscani, was a photo-
journalist at the daily newspaperCorriere della
Sera. At the age of 19, Toscani enrolled in the
Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, where he studied
photography. His education in the medium was
not limited to technical matters, however, as one
of his teachers was Serge Stauffer, a colleague of
the French avant-garde master Marcel Duchamp.
From the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the
1980s, he worked as a fashion photographer for
most of the leading international magazines in the
field:Elle,Vogue,Lei,G.Q., andHarper’s Bazaar.
He quickly became known for provocative adver-
tisements for fashion clients such as Jesus Jeans,
Prenatal, Valentino, Esprit, and Fiorucci.
In 1982 he began his collaboration with Bene-
tton as the creative director of this worldwide
clothing company, which had stores in more than
100 countries. The advertising campaign he con-
ceived, known as ‘‘United Colors of Benetton,’’
was meant to evoke the idea of a new tribe of
young people spread all over the world, of different
races or from different traditions, but equal under
a Benetton sweater. The Benetton advertising cam-
paign relied heavily on portraits. A predilection for
the human subject came to Toscani via the work of
August Sander and his famousAntlitz der Zeit
project of 1929. Like Sander, who used clothing,
accoutrements, and props to transmit the social
status or profession of his subjects, Toscani created
the meaning of his models through the use of
symbols and identifying objects.
His first series portrayed groups of teenagers or
children of various races and origins, embracing
and kissing each other. The positive and high-spir-
ited nature of this campaign was well received, as its
message of understanding and peace was not inher-
ently controversial and only those filled with pre-
judice would find it distasteful. From 1985 on
Toscani began to inject more political meaning
into his message, using portraits of couples, often
a man and a woman, shot in half-length, with flags
in the photograph that supposedly identified their
origins. Again most of these advertisements were
overt in their desire for understanding, unity, and
peace, such as the photograph in which a couple
wearing a single sweater embraces, although one is
identified through the use of flags as being from the
USSR and the other from the USA. Made during
the Cold War, the message was hard to argue with
unless one took the position it was saccharine
because of its unrealistic nature. In 1986, in order
to identify his models, Toscani began to use stereo-
types: in the seriesEnemieshe costumes an Israeli
and a Palestinian in traditional dress. They are
joined by Toscani in a pacific embrace. While such
depictions aroused ire in their use of confronta-
tional images about volatile topics, they were gen-
erally well accepted.
Since 1989, the flags disappeared and the mes-
sages became more subtle, though richer with con-
troversy, such as the campaignContrasts in Black
& White. For one 1990 ad he shot a detail of two
wrists, a white man’s and a black man’s joined
together by one handcuffs. No fashion is anywhere
on view, and the universal messages of the earlier
work are absent. The viewer is immediately chal-
lenged to identify his or her own prejudices: Which
is the policeman and which the criminal? But per-
haps more disturbing to many was the ad which
showed a black woman suckling a white baby, as
the straightforward depiction of breasts in adver-
tising was still a taboo. His imagery became
increasingly confrontational and even scandalous,
especially when displayed in public on billboards.
Some magazines refused to publish them, in parti-
cular the photo of a newborn child, still dirty with
blood and placenta and attached to the umbilical
cord. Sometimes campaigns found innocuous in
certain countries and cultures were found porno-
graphic in others, such as a picture of children
sticking out their tongues, considered an obscene
gesture in Arab cultures.
In 1992, Toscani took a new approach: he chose
agency images from Magnum and Sygma, and
transformed them into advertisements merely by
applying the Benetton label to them. The most
shocking image in this series was the one which
portrayed David Kirby, a young American sick
with AIDS, shot in the moment of death. In 1994,
one of his images was used like a symbol in occasion
of a series of celebrations in South Africa. TheTOSCANI, OLIVIERO